For those expecting President Barack Obama to expound on the accomplishments of his laundry list of science and innovation policy he outlined in last year’s State of the Union, there were a few nods to but no specifics in this third State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

As Forbes reported this morning for those interested in science and science policy the President’s address “offered some pretty thin gruel.”

The President stayed loyal to his pet issues of investment in basic research, jobs creation, education, clean energy and innovation.

With an expected mention of Steve Jobs he tied basic research to innovation. He said…

“Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.”

As in previous years President Obama focused his remarks around preparing and educating the country to create new jobs, new industries, innovate new energy sources, safeguard our security and find national prosperity. But in this speech, the President bookended his address with salutes to military achievements — first of getting U.S. troops out of an autonomous Iraq and then in ridding the world of Osama Bin Laden. And in the end he proclaimed…

This nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

But where is the meat of science policy that dotted previous addresses?

Last year the President kept the commitment he made in his State of the Union by submitting to Congress a budget with increases to National Science Foundation as a way to bolster basic research.

This year, he said…

Don’t gut these investments in our budget.

Last year President Obama set an ambitious goal: By 2035, he wants 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from clean energy sources.

This year he focused on natural gas being extracted from shale in the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing. He said…

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. Because America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock –- reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

Now, what’s true for natural gas is just as true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled, and thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Like last year the President found a 55-year-old furniture maker in need of job retraining. Last year it was North Carolinia’s Kathy Proctor who moved into the biotechnology field. This year he featured Bryan Ritterby from Michigan to tell the story of how a luxury yacht factory was converted to make wind turbines, which enabled Bryan to get a new job.

He also featured Jackie Bray, a single mom from North Carolina who went from being a mechanic to community college where she was retrained in lasers and robotics and now works for a gas turbine factory owned by Siemen’s in Charolotte.

President Obama made a clear point. The economy is changing and so must the way we educate people and prepare them for a new kind of workforce. He said…

Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that –- openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work. It’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

One way he proposes fixing it is by allowing students who come to the U.S. to study or those born here but to undocumented worker parents to become full citizens. He said…

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: the fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.

If those words sound familiar, you’re right. President Obama said almost the same thing last year. Then he said, “Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.”

Like last year, the President renewed his call for foreign students who are trying to obtain advanced degrees to be allowed to stay in the U.S. once they finish their studies.

Last year, he said, “But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who could be staffing our research labs or starting a new business, who could be further enriching this nation.”

This year, he said…

But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

On a final environmental note, President Obama recognized that comprehensive climate change legislation is not even on the political table this year. In a stern voice he threw down the gauntlet and challenged Congress to take a baby step. He said…

The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well, tonight, I will.”

The President announced that the Department of Defense is making a large clean energy commitment. He says the Navy is purchasing one gigawatt of wind energy electricity capacity, enough to power 250,000 homes each year. He also unveiled an executive plan to develop enough clean energy opportunities on public land to power three million homes.

But following a State of the Union last year that got many us all excited about the role in science in the Administration there were some conspicuous absences.

Like increasing access to taxpayer-funded research. Last year the President talked about openness and transparency in government that would allow taxpayers to see where research dollars go. But there was no mention of that commitment this year.

Alex Knapp, a reporter at Forbes adds to the list of missed State of the Union mentions. He asks the President, “Why not a program for building more makerspaces in public libraries? Why not build more on the contests the government has been running to solve certain scientific problems? How about broadening access to taxpayer-funded research and doing more to let the public and entrepreneurs out there know what discoveries are ripe for developing into economic opportunities? How about anything besides a banal platitude?”

SOTU Factoids:

Number of times Science mentioned 2
Number of times Technology mentioned 2
Number of times Engineering mentioned 1
Number of times Math mentioned 0
Number of times Climate mentioned 1
Number of times Innovation mentioned 6
Number of times Energy mentioned 23
Number of times Education mentioned 8

Republican Rebuttal Factoids:

Number of times Science mentioned 0
Number of times Technology mentioned 1
Number of times Engineering mentioned 0
Number of times Math mentioned 2
Number of times Climate mentioned 0
Number of times Innovation mentioned 0
Number of times Energy mentioned 2
Number of times Education mentioned 1

After several deaths of people in Cambodia, Vietnam and China recently, the bird flu is making a comeback in public discourse. Concerns are growing about the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus. A few years ago the world-sweeping swine flu stole headlines but the bird flu, which is much more virulent than it’s porcine cousin, has been spreading from poultry to people.

An 18-year-old duck farmer in Vietnam died last week, becoming the first bird flu fatality in that country in two years. The World Health Organization also reports that a two-year-old boy in Cambodia died from bird flu after being exposed to sick poultry in his village. Those deaths follow quickly on the heals of a 39-year-old Chinese bus driver dying on December 31 just outside of Hong Kong. And a 24-year-old man and five-year-old toddler in Indonesia also reportedly died from the bird flu this year.

The WHO says that makes 343 deaths from 582 cases of bird flu since 2003 when the virus first began hopping from birds to people.

But now growing fear over the necessary research to better understand this pathogen, which has a 60 percent mortality rate, is forcing bird flu scientists to take a 60-day break.

Researchers studying a more deadly version of the H5N1 virus that can be spread through the air voluntarily suspended their research for two months after bioethicists raised concerns of the virus being turned into a bioweapon.

Electron Micrograph of the H5N1 Influenza Virus

This deep concern began in late December when a U.S. federal government scientific advisory board asked two peer-review journals not to publish the papers if they explained how they were able to genetically modify the current, naturally-occurring strain of bird flu. The government scientists made the virus even more deadly by making it airborne.

Just days after that announcement and before the papers could be published, government advisers demanded the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands.

The scientists who created the deadlier H5N1 in the lab say they needed to know if the current strain has the potential to mutate into an airborne one. It does. They just sped up the process. Knowing that key piece of information will allow countries to take more severe measures to eradicate the newly emerging illness.

Now the story about bird flu has mutated as well, raising concerns that the manmade strain of the virus is now a bigger threat than the naturally-occurring one, which seldom hops from poultry to people.

In a letter that appeared in both journalsScience and Nature, several key bird flu researchers explain why they are temporarily halting their research.

The principal investigators at the labs where the bird flu research is being conducted say that perceived fear of the new manmade strain of the flu virus escaping the lab is making them push the pause button for 60 days.

Drs. Ron Fouchier, Adolfo García-Sastre, Yoshihiro Kawaoka and 36 others recognize that they and the rest of the scientific community need to more clearly explain the benefits of bird flu research and reassure the public that the biosafety measures taken minimize its possible risks.

They say, “We have agreed on a voluntary pause of 60 days on any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses leading to the generation of viruses that are more transmissible in mammals.”

The controversial research that prompted government warnings and the voluntary research suspension centered around ferrets. The researchers proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets.

Scanning Electron Microscope Image of H5N1 Avian Flu Virus

But now the perceived fear of the ferret-infected virus escaping from the secure labs is creating a fear pandemic instead.

They continue, “We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.”

The scientists agree their research is absolutely necessary to help to public health efforts detect when the H5N1 influenza virus might change in the wild, sparking a human pandemic. But Fouchier of Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands, Garcia-Sastre of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the lead authors on the letter in Science and Nature nevertheless are voluntarily suspending it so public perception can catch up.

Censorship in Science

When a U.S. government advisory panel told the editors of Science and Nature to censor a submitted bird flu paper, the complex issue also enjoined the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The reason for asking for censorship was noble. Biosecurity experts fear an airborne version of the H5N1 flu virus that becomes transmissible between humans could create a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed between 20 million and 40 million people.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) made the following recommendations about the publication of two papers submitted on the highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1:

1. Neither manuscript should be published with complete data and experimental details.

2. Conclusions of the manuscripts be published but without experimental details and
mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.

a) Text should be added describing: 1) the goals of the research, 2) the potential
benefits to public health (including informing surveillance efforts, pandemic
preparedness activities, and countermeasure development and stockpiling efforts), 3)
the risk assessments performed prior to research initiation, 4) the ongoing biosafety
oversight, containment, and occupational health measures, 5) biosecurity practices
and adherence to select agent regulation, and 6) that addressing biosafety, biosecurity,
and occupational health is part of the responsible conduct of all life sciences research.

b) The NSABB should develop a statement that explains their review process and
rationale for the recommendations. This statement will be provided to the journals to
consider for publication.

c) The USG should encourage the authors to submit a special
communication/commentary letter to the journals regarding the dual use research
issue.

In other words, don’t publish the whole genome and don’t explain exactly how this mutation occurred.

Both journals responded by agreeing to the recommendations in part.

Science writer Carl Zimmer sums it up best. He describes the journals’ response, “In essence, “We haven’t decided yet. It would be nice if you let us know how responsible scientists could get hold of the data.”

Since science is rooted in reproducibility this type of censorship flies in the face of the method.

But the U.S. government does have a history of censoring sensitive science, including the recipe for nuclear fission and fusion. And now the formula for ferret to ferret transmission of bird flu.

Columbia University virologists Vincent Racaniello tells Zimmer the censorship move doesn’t make any sense. He says, “The point of a science paper is to enable others to duplicate the findings. Are we going to set a new precedent, where security matters override the reason for publication? This is setting a very dangerous precedent for virology and biological sciences in general.”

But in the end, the scientists themselves agreed to grudgingly redact contested parts of the papers.

Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands says this type of activity is unprecedented. He believes that public health is best served by making the information widely available. A spokesman for Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison also says the lead author will modify the paper and resubmit it.

Meanwhile the editors of Nature and Science are working with government officials to iron out a “written, transparent plan” for relevant scientists to have access to the critical details of this research, which will likely not make the published version of the papers. Science editor-in-chief Bruce Albersis confident that this all can be resolved in a couple of weeks.

The official hydraulic fracturing song and video is so catchy and fun because it sounds like swearing. At least that’s why Time magazine deigned it number 2 in the Top 10 Creative Videos of 2011. Based on the three-year investigation by ProPublica into concerns about chemical pollution in the water supply near fracking drill sites, the song focuses on methane being released into the groundwater where drilling is happening.

But what’s the real science behind the accusatory lyrics, which leave the listener wondering if this new, cheap way of extracting natural gas is actually contributing to the global warming problem?

Oil and gas companies see it as a cleaner, more environmentally responsible energy alternative.

Hydraulic Fracturing in Shale

But a Cornell study last year found something different. It says that the methane in natural gas extracted by hydrofracking in shale makes it a potent climate changer. The study and others since then argue that methane leaks unburned into the air during extraction and processing prior to burning. And methane is considerably far more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Methane has an atmospheric life of 20 years compared to carbon dioxide’s 100. But methane can cause other problems.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies says, “There are indirect effects from methane emissions because it is chemically reactive in the atmosphere. It contributes to increases in tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapor (increasing the warming impact), and by changing the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere, affects it’s own lifetime, and that of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrous oxide (NOx) – which in turn affects aerosol formation, and indeed aerosol-cloud interactions.”

After a Duke University study found hydrofracking was polluting water to the extent that some kitchen taps could be set on fire, the water contamination issue began to boil.

Just recently, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun trucking water to homes in a town in Pennsylvania as a precaution.

Robert Jackson, who was part of the Duke Study says, “We certainly didn’t expect to see such a strong relationship between the concentration of methane in water and the nearest gas wells. That was a real surprise.”

The research found that water supplies within six-tenths of a mile of a hydraulic fracturing operation had on average 17 times more methane in the drinking water than wells further away from drilling sites.

Homeowner Lights Methane Contaminated Tap Water on Fire

In mid-January the U.S. EPA informed New York officials that the state needed better safeguards to protect water supplies near hyrdofracking sites.

To free the gas trapped in the underground shale formations, drillers pump millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground under enough pressure to fracture rock. The wastewater left over from the process has a way of getting into drinking water by being disposed of at sewage treatment plants.

In 2004, the EPA found that hydrofracking posed no risk to drinking water. Then Congress exempted the process, created by Halliburton in the 1990s, from the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result of those moves, hydrofracking is now the common gas extraction method in nine out of every ten natural gas wells in the U.S. And there are almost 500,000 shale gas wells in the U.S., twice as many as there were in 1990.

In 2010 the EPA and other federal health officials, cautioned some Wyoming residents not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes when they bathed because the methane in the water could cause an explosion. In December, the EPA made the link between fracking and water contamination for the first time.

My Water’s on Fire Tonight

by David Holmes

Fracking is a form of natural gas drilling
An alternative to oil cause the oil kept spilling
Bringing jobs to small towns so everybody’s willing
People turn on their lights and the drillers make a killing

Water goes into the pipe, the pipe into the ground
The pressure creates fissures 7,000 feet down
The cracks release the gas that powers your town
That well is fracked….. Yeah totally fracked

But there’s more in the water than just H2O
Toxic chemicals help to make the fluid flow
With names like benzene and formaldehyde
You better keep ‘em far away from the water supply

The drillers say the fissures are a mile below
The groundwater pumped into American homes
But don’t tell it to the residents of Sublette Wy-O
That water’s fracked…. We’re talking Benzene…

What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight

So it all goes back to 2005
Bush said gas drillers didn’t have to comply
with the Safe Drinking Water Act, before too long
It was “frack, baby, frack” until the break of dawn.

With the EPA out it was up to the states
But they didn’t have the money to investigate
Sick people couldn’t prove fracking was to blame
All the while water wells were going up in flames

Cause it’s hard to contain all the methane released
It can get into the air, it can get into the streams.
It’s a greenhouse gas, worse than CO2
Fracking done wrong could lead to climate change too

Now it’s not that drillers should never be fracking
But the current regulation is severely lacking
Reduce the toxins, contain the gas and wastewater
And the people won’t get sick and the planet won’t get hotter

What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight

Music by David Holmes and Andrew Bean
Vocals by David Holmes and Niel Bekker
Animation by Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker
Created by the Studio 20 journalism project at NYU.

Beaches along the coasts of Washington and Oregon are treasure troves of flotsam for avid beachcombers. But one scientist says that what’s on its way to the west coast is unprecedented and those areas are totally unprepared.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer is a self-proclaimed expert on manmade stuff that floats the ocean blue. He even wrote the book on it, called Flotsametrics and the Floating World.

Now he says the first evidence of what could be 20 million tons of debris from coastal Japan is beginning to arrive. After the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami devastated the eastern coast of Japan last March, cars, houses, people and their belongings were swept out to sea. Still over 20,000 people are dead or reported missing.

Ebbesmeyer says, “We are not prepared for this. Nobody is prepared. Nobody has even thought through the dimensions.”

And prepared or not, the floating field of debris is on its way. A buoy that landed on a beach in northwest Washington may be the first evidence of the flotsam storm that’s brewing at sea.

3 Japanese Buoy Types Washing Ashore from Oregon to Alaska, Photo by John Ingraham

He estimates that 25 percent will sink as it floats along ocean currents. Another 25 percent could reach the west coast of the U.S. and Canada. Probably another 25 percent will enter into the Pacific Gyre and return to Japan but not for about six years. The rest will likely pass by Hawaii on the way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where it will join plastic refuse from all over the world.

The Path of Japan's Earthquake and Tsunami Debris As It Moves from Japan towards the U.S. West Coast. Click on the image to see the animation.

He says, “There’s never been a devastation on one continent that has moved off to the other continent and actually recorded.”

Because of the nuclear accident that followed the earthquake and tsunami, Ebbesmeyer is concerned that some of the Japanese flotsam could carry radioactive material.

Nir Barnea from NOAA says there is little cause for alarm. He expects most of what washes up on Washington and Oregon beaches to be lumber and some household items. He says, “We don’t expect any debris items that are exotic or unusual.”

But beachcombers are always looking for those unusual items. Frequently Japanese fishing floats wash ashore in Washington after a big storm. If and when beachcombers find any Japanese items they can report the finds to Ebbesmeyer who is tracking the arrivals online.

The big west coast arrival wasn’t expected for about two years. In October a Russian cargo ship spotted boats, refrigerators and large pieces of homes near the Midway Islands about 1,700 miles from Hawaii and about 300 miles further east than expected.

NASA Projects Debris Field Track

That sighting forced scientists to revise their estimates down from five years to two. The Japanese flotsam patch is roughly twice the size of Texas and heading on a direct course with the Washington and Oregon coast traveling at about 7 miles per hour.

Ebbesmeyer says get ready because lighter weight items like the black buoy that washed ashore near Neah Bay, WA will get to the U.S. faster. He says that if the items ride high in the water, are lightweight and have a lot of area exposed to wind, they can travel up to 20 miles per hour. That means some items from Japan could begin landing on beaches as early as next year.

Ebbesmeyer believes the debris landing area will be more spread out than predicted. He thinks beaches from southern Alaska to California will see personal items from broken Japanese lives.

And at a December 13 meeting he said, “All debris should be treated with a great reverence and respect.”

He adds, “As of December 30, 2011, beachcombers reported more than 23 buoys from 17 locations scattered between central Oregon to Kodiak Alaska. He even says that a woman named Jody Godoy traced the writing on one buoy to an oyster farm along the tsunami-ravaged coast.

Ebbesmeyer is a retired oceanographer who has tracked ice bergs, oil from the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and sewage outflow into Washington state’s Puget Sound. But he is known as the founder of Beachcombers Alert where he and his team track things that float, including tennis shoes, rubber duckies and messages in bottles.

Right now there are about one million magnetized atoms involved in one bit of information. A bit is defined as a variable that can have only two possible values, 1 or 0. In computing those values are interpreted as binary digits. And IBM just lowered that minimum threshold from one million to 12.

For years computer scientists have been trying to figure out how small a storage device can be before it runs into the laws of quantum dynamics. The answer IBM recently learned is 12. Data can be stored and retrieved using just 12 atoms.

While that is all well and good it is not terribly useful in the real world. To figure out the bottom threshold for non-quantum computing researchers had to build the miniscule storage device atom by atom, which is an extremely labor-intensive and expensive process not suited for mass manufacturing. And the whole process is only stable at the mind-freezing temperature of five degrees above absolute zero.

So while the 12-atom hard drive doesn’t make much sense, a larger 150-atom storage device may not have the same limitations. With that in mind pinhead-sized hard drives could store a terabyte of information or a thumb drive could potentially store every movie you’ve ever seen.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab says, “At IBM we are interested in finding out how the magnetic properties evolve from single atoms to something that might be useful for technology or data storage.”

This figure shows the a magnetic byte imaged 5 times in different magnetic states. A white signal on the right edge corresponds to logic 0 (and is labeled as such) and a blue signal to logic 1. Between two successive images the magnetic states of the bits were switched to encode the binary representation of the ASCII characters "THINK"

Computing follows a theory called Moore’s Law which dictates shrinking the size of computer components over time. The general timeline goes like this. The number of transitors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles every 18-24 months.

Currently, Moore’s Law has indicates one million iron atoms can store one bit of information. After five years of hard work, IBM smashed that incremental process and drove that down to just 12 atoms. They didn’t do it inexpensively as Moore’s Law requires but the experiment does show the limit of this technological trend.

Opposites Attract

In performing this experiment IBM basically put an new spin on the old addage, “Opposites attract.”

Storage devices like hard drives and flash drives use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of the atoms is aligned in the same direction.

IBM figured out how to fit more atoms in less space by using antiferromagnetism, which allows atoms to spin in opposite directions.

Heinrich and his team created an atomic-scale magnet memory device that is at least a hundred times denser than today’s hard drives or solid state memory chips.

By spinning atoms in opposite directions with the help of an scanning tunneling microscope, IBM created iron atoms with opposite magnetization. Atoms with the same spin need space. Opposite spin pulls the atoms more tightly together, making it possible to squeeze more of them in less space.

The team started with just one atom and continued adding atoms until the little magentic memory could store one bit of information. That is the same amount of information stored in one binary digit. Then the team continued building and used 96 atoms to store one byte of information (equivalent to one letter or number on a keyboard.)

To show their proof of concept the team spelled IBM’s signature THINK using 480 magnetized atoms.

While still impractical for computer hardware applications this research proves previous theoretical limits to data storage do not exist.

A spokesman for IBM says that 150 atoms per bit is the most stable configuration at room temperature. For the purposes of this experiment the team used iron atoms on a copper nitrite surface. The spokesman says that other materials would likely yield even better results.

Detailed explanation of the IBM research in atomic scale magnetic memory

Samantha Garvey wants to be a marine biologist and the science-focused 17 year old is now one of 61 finalists from Long Island in the Intel Science & Engineering Fair for her pioneering work with mussels.

But the real story of this scientist-in-training is that she is able to excel in the classroom as an honor’s student without all the creature comforts of home. In fact, the teen and her family are homeless and living in a shelter on Long Island, New York.

Both of her parents were unable to work following a car accident. As a result of falling behind on their rent, the family was evicted from their apartment on December 31. After advancing to the Intel finals, this science rags to riches story garnered national attention and a community banded together to get the family a house.

Samantha Garvey, Intel Science Fair Finalist

Now the science. The enterprising Samantha has been studying inedible marsh mussels for the last two years. But a nagging question kept eating at her and prompted her investigation, which she entered into the Intel science competition. She was studying how mussels settle in salt marshes and noticed mussel concentrations appeared to be higher in areas where there were more crabs, one of the mussels’ primary predators.

She tells Good Day New York, “I thought this was weird. How are they surviving in areas where they are being preyed upon?”

Thinking that observation runs counter to what she would expect she did a little experiment, studying mussels in areas of low and high crab predation. She discovered that that mussel shells were actually thicker in super crabby areas and a bit thinner in less crabby waters.

So she tested her theory by putting crabs and mussels together to see what would happen. She discovered that the mussels adapted to the threat by increasing the thickness of their shells.

Garvey says, “I discovered when you expose a crab to a mussel, they grew thicker, heavier shells to defend themselves.”

Hoping to be selected from 1,500 finalists from 65 countries as a $100,000 scholarship winner of the Intel science competition, Garvey intends to study marine biology at either Brown or Yale, her top two picks for her undergraduate studies. From there she would like to continue studying invasive species.

Full interview (6:54) with Samantha Garvey on Good Day New York. Greg finds out why there are holes in mussels at restaurants.

Leann Lloyd had the dubious honor of lugging a metallic rock through airport security in Missouri. She was on her way back to Albuquerque and the Meteorite Museum at University of New Mexico after retrieving the missing meteorite.

She says, “It stopped the line and caused a big hub-bub and three or four agents came over and pulled it out.”

The meteorite isn’t that big but because of its density weighs about 50 pounds. And apparently a suspect just walked out of the museum through the front door carrying the space rock before winter break.

Sikhote Alin Meteorite, Stolen from UNM Museum

The museum director noticed the empty case when he was giving a private tour during the holiday closure. He immediately put out an all-points meteorite bulletin through an international collector’s group and within a day had tracked the rock to Missouri, where Lloyd was sent to bring it home.

After orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for eons, the rock hit Russia about 60 years ago and landed in New Mexico when a Russian scientist gave the remarkable specimen to the first director of the musuem. Since then the rock sat still until straying off course just before Christmas.

Kent agee says the rock, which sold for $1,700 is not just a great scientific specimen but also one of historical significance. He places the value of the meteorite at about $40,000. The suspect who sold the stolen space rock used his real name in the transaction so the International Meteorite Collectors Association was able to track him easily.

Though he has not been arrested yet the thief stole the Sikhote-Alin, a 9,000 gram iron-nickel meteorite for the money. The UNM meteorite museum is closed while a full security review is conducted.

John Schooler, a meteorite collector and dealer in Missouri sees occasional alerts on the IMCA site. He says, “It’s not good. But like anyhting of value it has the potential of being stolen. They’ve done this for generations. The size here is unusual. He had to show some physical exertion to do it not just stick it in his pocket.”

Maggie Arias is on her way to becoming the next iTunes sensation. The Atlanta-area 6th Grader is not your typical pop princess though. She uses “thermosphere” in her song, Aurora, which pays tribute to the beauty and power of the Northern Lights.

When her teacher asked each student to become an expert on a science subject they studied last semester and teach the class, young Maggie chose the aurora borealis. She didn’t want to make a cardboard display or a power point presentation like the other students so she decided to make a song. Since her dad, Chris, is a professional musician, the two collaborated — daughter on science, dad on musicality — to make a hit that kids are downloading.

Maggie tells Fox5 in Atlanta her song “was talking about how big the aurora was and how beautiful it is and how there’s so many different colors. It would be so different if we didn’t have it.”

Her Dad says, “The thing that struck me is how this incredibly powerful cosmic event is turned into such a beautifully serene light show in the sky. If you thought for a second about our magnetic field being different or weaker than it is, yikes!”

To complete her assignment, though the student needed at least five paragraphs of information, including some important science.

Aurora

by Maggie & Chris Arias
Instrument Approach Music, Inc. / ASCAP, ©2011

Iʼm in Alaska
The sky is glowing
Without a sound

Energyʼs growing
Red and green oxygen

Blue and purple nitrogen
Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora

Inside the beauty
More power than lightning
Intoxicating
It should be frightening

Red and green oxygen
Blue and purple nitrogen

Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora

The thermosphere erupts in silence
Making beauty of cosmic violence
The sun assaults the skies
You dance before my eyes

You make me wish that I could fly
Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora

The one idea Maggie wants to convey is that the power of the Northern Lights should not be underestimated. Her dad wrote some of the lyrics with her words ringing in his ears. She says, “20 million amps at 50,000 volts, dad! That’s BIG TIME ENERGY!!!!!!!!”

So they decided to make it a high energy song with a dance beat.

Maggie’s song is available at the iTunes store.
Here’s a preview.

In 2006 bees began disappearing. Entomologists have never been exactly able to pinpoint the cause of syndrome, which they now call colony collapse disorder. It occurs when the worker bees abandon the hive and the whole system falls apart. No one knows why the bees leave. Some have suggested they get disoriented and can’t find their way back home. After studying fungus, chemicals, environmental toxins, a new possibility is on the rise.

Honeybee Hive, Abuzz with Activity

Call them zom-bees.

John Hafernik, an insect biologist at San Francisco State University made an accidental but significant discovery, which could explain colony collapse disorder.

He found that a parasitic fly had deposited eggs into the honey bee’s abdomen and the maggots were incubating there, feeding on the bee’s internal organs. It sounds like something out of a horror movie but Dr. Hafernik says that the flies were turning the worker bees into zombies. And that could explain why they were abandoning their hives.

It all started on a cold morning a few years ago when he noticed a bunch of dead and dying bees on the sidewalk near his office. Among the dozens of dead bees he noticed some still living bees appeared disoriented, walking off kilter and in circles. He knew the bees came from a nearby hive but thought they would have had the sense to stay inside when it was so cold. As a curious scientist he scooped a bunch of bees into a test tube and took them upstairs to his lab where he filed them on his desk top.

After about a week in his lab, Hafernik looked at the vial again and saw little brown pupae. He immediately knew they were fledgling flies. He set his students to work studying this serendipitous scientific moment.

Forage Fly Lays Eggs Inside Unsuspecting Honey Bee, Photo by Chris Quock

Hafernik says, “There was nothing left inside the bee.”

Hafernik and his research team has figured out the scary cycle. Apparently, a fertile fly uses the bee’s appendage called an ovipositer to lay fly eggs inside the bee, where they hatch into lots and lots of maggots.

Graduate student Christopher Quock says the team found 25 maggots in one of the bees.

Hafernik says, “They eat them; eat them from the inside out.”

He says the maggots start their meal in the abdomen then the baby flies eat their way into the wing muscle and eventually the brain. They pop out between the head and thorax.

Hafernik says, “It’s kind of a bee’s worst nightmare.”

Figuring out what happened to the bees a few years ago is not just a bee problem. Bees are primary pollinators and are a critical piece of the U.S. agricultural process. Without honeybees many crops can’t produce food for us to eat.

While Hafernik won’t confirm that flies taking over bees and eating them from the inside out is the cause of colony collapse disorder he does see it as yet another viable reason for it. And, the symptoms do fit the situation.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp of the University of Maryland, College Park says casting a wary eye on the fly is “certainly worth a lot more attention.”

Maggot Emerges from Honey Bee's Head, Photo courtesy of John Hafernik

But according to their research which appears in PLoS ONE they discovered that just 5-15 percent of the bees in a SFSU campus hive near the bug building had been turned into zom-bees. That’s not enough to cause complete colony collapse disorder. But it does raise a whole host of new questions.

Namely, where did the parasitizing of honey bees begin? DNA analysis of commercial hive samples suggests that the type of fly found inside the honey bees comes from South Dakota and the Central Valley of California.

Bee pathologist Elke Genersch of the Institute for Bee Research in Hohen Neuendorf, Germany says, “Extensive surveys are now needed on the distribution of the flies in the global honey bee population.”

Since honey bees are trucked between those two locations to assist in pollination for the U.S. agricultural industry, it is conceivable that isolated cases of zom-bees hopped on the road and spread quickly, aided by modern transport.

Colony collapse disorder is blamed on the loss of seven percent of all honey bee hives in North America each year. And this was a disorder that has only been around for six years.

Eric Mussen at the University of California, Davis says that based on the infection rate at the SFSU campus hive, the parasite “does not appear to be a dominate factor.” But Genersch is concerned that the fly population could explode if the parasitizing flies get into entire hives and turn all the drones into zom-bees.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp talks honey bee disappearance at the 2008 Taste3 conference.

Recently scientists in Australia discovered that two species of sharks are interbreeding. The common black-tip shark and the Australian black-tip shark have started producing hybrid sharks. Marine biologists in Queensland say they’ve found 57 sharks so far.

The common black-tip shark is found around the world in subtropical and temperate ocean waters while the smaller Australian black-tip shark is more suited to warmer, tropical waters. The combination of the two species — which is extremely unusual — could be a response to climate change.

Lead researcher Jess Morgan of the University of Queensland says, “If it [the Australian black-tip species] hybridizes with the common species it can effectively shift its range further south into cooler waters, so the effect of this hybridizing is a range expansion. It’s enabled a species restricted to the tropics to move into temperate waters.”

The team confirmed the cross-breeding through DNA analysis. The team found the 57 hybrid sharks along 1,250 miles of coastline on the east coast of Australia.

Jennifer Ovenden, one of the co-authors on the paper, which appears in the journal Conservation Genetics says, Hybridization could enable the sharks to adapt to environmental change as the smaller Australian black tip currently favors tropical waters in the north while the larger common black tip is more abundant in sub-tropical and temperate waters along the south-eastern Australian coastline.”

Morgan says, “You’re seeing evolution in action.” Mixing two species of animals like this increases its chance of survival. Animals start interbreeding when their existence is threatened. By combining genetics, these sharks become stronger, making them more able to withstand changes to their environment.

Hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking to reach deep pockets of natural gas seems to be the culprit behind a small earthquake that shook Youngstown, Ohio on Saturday. By Monday, state lawmakers had imposed a two-week ban on drilling while the latest quake is investigated.

Since the epicenter of the 4.0 quake is less than one-tenth of a mile from an injection drilling site, many feel confident that the drilling practice is to blame.

Breaking rock with chemicals, sand and water pressure is a common practice used to access big pockets of natural gas trapped inside large underground geological formations. But that practice comes with a slew of environmental concerns.

Secondary wells drilled to dispose of the water/chemical mix called injection wells could be triggering the earthquakes, which have grown from rare in the area to monthly events.

A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says that the frack water being sunk in the Youngstown area isn’t just from Ohio. Over half of the waste water comes from nearby Pennsylvania, where the majority of the Marcellus Shale is located.

Deputy Director Andy Ware of ODNR says, “While we couldn’t say for sure that there’s a direct causation between the injection well and the earthquakes, we thought it better to be overly cautious.”

After a small earthquake in Youngstown on Christmas Eve, regulators asked drilling companies to stop injecting frack water into the ground. And after the New Year’s Eve quake, they decided to stop all drilling within a five-mile radius until the quake can be investigated.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pennsylvania started shipping its frack water over the Ohio state lines, increasing the Ohio frack water burden by 400 percent since March 2011. Pennsylvania has permitted 7 injection drill sites while Ohio has 194.

Until April of last year Pennsylvania had been disposing of its drill waste “water” at treatment plants. But the treatment process didn’t remove all the chemicals and they escape into the groundwater. Now, much of that frack water is trucked over the Ohio state line and injected into the ground.

A city official of Hubbard Township, a mile from the Ohio-Pennsylvania border says, “It’s too toxic to discharge into the ground in Pennsylvania, but it’s OK to discharge into the ground in Ohio.”

And now it seems that practice may be causing earthquakes in an area that was seismically stable.

Michael C. Hansen, state geologist and coordinator of the Ohio Seismic Network says there is “little doubt” the quakes are related to injection well operations.

Geologists have long suspected that injecting liquids into underground rock formations can trigger earthquakes along fault lines because the liquids allow rock to flow more easily past each other. When rocks slide, the earth quakes.

For many, 2011 was the year of Steve Jobs. His bright, creative light went dark. His legacy of innovation and creativity lives on in the products of Apple and the people who work there. But his reach extends much further. Political scientists, business gurus and pop culture junkies are still calculating exactly how big of an impact Jobs had on shaping modern society. And despite his death, I don’t think he’s quite done yet.

Certainly, no one would argue that Steve Jobs made personal computing much more personal. The cold, hard, immutable technology became warm, brightly colored and comforting under the watchful eye of Jobs and his creative team.

Perhaps the greatest gift Steve Jobs left us all was the ability to recognize how important art and creativity is to fostering innovation and solving technological challenges.

No one agrees with that more than Harvey White, the cofounder of QUALCOMM and former CEO of Leap Wireless International, a cellphone company on the cutting edge of technology development. Familiar with the education jargon Science, Technology, Engineering, Math or STEM he felt compelled to add an A for Arts.

At a San Diego economic development meeting last year, White said, “We simply cannot compete in the new economy unless we do something now about creativity and innovation.”

He and many others view an infusion of art as a means to preserve America’s advantage in the future.

"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning unexpected findings of science." - Carl Sagan. Painting by Pat Linse

After all, Steve Jobs and Apple demonstrated that infusing sleek art and design elements into technology is the formula for great success and untold riches.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley predicts that the jobs in greatest demand in the future don’t yet exist. In fact, he says they will require workers to use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we don’t yet even know are problems.

After all, Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

In addition to technical know-how, many of these challenges will require fresh, creative and artistic solutions.

Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama have called for strong investment in our nation’s education system, especially when it comes to STEM fields. But art is conspicuously absent from the discussion.

President Bush authorized the STEM initiative for Science Technology Engineering and Math. And with it came a $151 million infusion of federal dollars to help students earn a bachelor’s degree, math and science teachers to get teaching credentials. It also provides additional money to help push Kindergarten through 12th Grade math and science curricula to better prepare students for college.

President Obama reauthorized the America COMPETES Act in 2010 and added his own initiatives including Educate to Innovate and Race to the Top, calling for a renewed focus on STEM education. As a result, STEM centers are popping up all over the country. STEM seems to be on everyone’s lips and a future without proper STEM preparation is viewed as a dark time, perhaps even the death knell of the U.S. leadership.

However, many global economists recognize that a more well-rounded education that includes STEM plus art and music is the direction the U.S. should head. Most analysts agree that growing a “creative and innovative” economy represents America’s best chance to stay competitive in the global knowledge economy.

Journalist Jonah Lehrer says that science needs to find a place for the arts. A STEAM advocate himself, he believes that the best science begins with a scientist imagining something — an idea, a universal truth — long before it can be experimentally proven. He says science often relies on metaphor.

STEM to STEAM

In the 1920s physicist Niels Bohr was studying the radiation given off by electrons. At this point in history, the classical model held that atoms were like miniature solar systems with the nucleus acting as the sun while electron planets whirred around it in orbit.

While analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, Bohr realized that the mini solar system idea didn’t hold up. In fact, what he learned about electron behavior seemed to defy every conventional explanation. At the time he said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” In this case as in many others ordinary words couldn’t accurately capture the data.

Lehrer says, “Science needed a new metaphor.” Bohr was an avid fan of Picasso and loved the the deconstructed cubist art of the time. He was quickly learning that the atomic world was much more abstract than science would admit at the time. Lehrer says, “For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object.”

Within the same time period, Louis de Broglie discovered that electrons could be either particles or waves. Thinking like a subjective artist, Bohr thought that which form they took depended how you looked at them.

Lehrer says, “This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.”

The students and instructors at the Rhode Island School of Design understand this principle all too well. In January the National Science Foundation and the renowned art school brought together over 60 leaders in science, creative information technology, engineering, art & design, math and education research to examine and develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of art and design.

With creative energy and structure, this collaboration is turning STEM to STEAM.

John Maeda, the president of RISD says, “When policymakers today talk about education and reform, it’s all about the STEM subjects. It’s about convergent thinking – problem solving by breaking it down. Instead, a divergent thinker takes an idea and looks to expand it, and to find new diverse ways to connect it.”

In June, Representative James Langevin (D-RI) heard those words as he submitted a House Resolution to add Art to existing STEM initiatives in federal agencies. In part the bill says, “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that adding art and design into Federal programs that target the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields encourages innovation and economic growth in the United States.”

Stephen Lane is the CEO of Ximedica, a company that develops medical products and services. But the company began at RISD with a base in fine arts and industrial design. Lane says many major companies started as art companies but became design-driven enterprises.

Lane believes that STEM enables but that design is what really drives innovation. He says, “My kids didn’t grow up in grade school saying I want to become a technical sound engineer. They grew up saying, I want to be a rock star.” He believes art and design are the capture points and where students must be engaged.

Invoking the memory of Steve Jobs, Lane says, “Those are the people who are truly changing the dynamic, meaningfully, impatiently and consistently over time.”

Steve Jobs Shows Apple's Sweet Spot at iPad Launch, 2010.

Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs, “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.”

Lehrer says at first glimpse science, in particular, physics may seem far removed from the subjective nature of the arts. But he says, “This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses.”

It’s true that physics theories are extracted from rather arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. But Lehrer suggests that just as artists rely on the imagination physics actually exceeds the imagination. He paraphrases Shakespear’s Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.”

Richard Feynman, the father of nanotechnology famously said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”

To find the ingenious within us all as Jobs did, we must focus our strength and energy on the critical intersection point of the arts and sciences. Science is art. Art is science. And both are interdependently woven into the fabric of human existence. They are inextricably linked and for that reason, Steve Jobs’ legacy will likely be that of one of the most visible visionaries to embrace the STEM to STEAM movement and without ever realizing it.

Rosie Redfield, at Home in the Lab

The scientists led by a young researcher named Felisa Wolfe-Simon claimed they were able to get Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. NASA even hyped the work ahead of the paper’s online publication in the journal Science. The press release announced, “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

However, Dr. Redfield read the paper and immediately knew it was wrong. She hopped online and pointed out the problems in her blog, RRResearch, which contains her frequent musings about life in her lab working with graduate students. On Dec. 4, 2010 she wrote a long post (and one she thought would be read by few,) which set off a firestorm over the arsenic paper.

Since then, she has appeared in the media and at science conferences talking about her post-publication comments of Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life paper. This year the journal Nature named her one of the ten science newsmakers of the year. In addition to saying what many other evolutionary biologists thought about the veracity of the arsenic DNA experiment, she also decided to use her blog as an open notebook where she has been busily trying to replicate the original arsenic experiment.

Her documentation of the process is not just fascinating from a technical perspective (which it is) but she carefully crafts experiments to test each question she has about the Wolfe-Simon study, slowly poking bigger holes in what many biologists regarded as a weak experiment anyway. Redfield isn’t concerned whether she is wrong or right. She just follows the science and looks for explanations along the way.

Her writings almost appear motherly and it’s easy to imagine her as a thesis or dissertation adviser to her students. In one post where she recounts her criticisms of the now-infamous biology paper, she admonishes lead author Wolfe-Simon for having sloppy experimental habits.

Within two days of reading the original paper in the journal Science, Redfield saw the flaws in the Wolfe-Simon experiment. She sees scientists making mistakes as just part of the process. But she chastises the all the scientists involved in that research for remaining silent and never correcting the problem.

She says, “Scientists in particular need to be able to admit their errors – we’re working not only at the frontiers of knowledge but at the frontiers of our abilities. Failure to admit we’ve been wrong is a betrayal of the scientific process.”

Since Wolfe-Simon didn’t admit making any mistakes Redfield says she had to prove the findings wrong.

Of the original arsenic research, she says, “Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”

So after she completed teaching her genomics class in the spring she turned her attention back to the arsenic experiment, which was clearly nagging at her.

On June 1, she outlined her plan of action for reproducing the original Wolfe-Simon experiment. But from the get-go she said, “If I can’t readily get GFAJ-1 [bacteria cells] growing nicely on the phosphate-based version of the medium the paper specifies, I’ll know that I’m out of my depth. At that point I’ll leave the whole mess for someone else to test.”

Her work revolved around two big questions.

Q. 1. Is the approximately tenfold growth difference between arsenic and phosphorus due to the cells’ use of arsenic in place of phosphorus in DNA, RNA and other biomolecules?

Q. 2. Does DNA purified from cells grown with less phosphorus and more arsenic contain significant amounts of covalently incorporated arsenic?

Just before Christmas, she told me, “This is a really simple experiment, a no-brainer,” which originally she thought might take a couple of weeks. It took her six months.

To start her experiment she sent away for GFAJ-1, the allegedly arsenic-loving bacterium on which Wolfe-Simon based her research of Mono Lake in California. (In some science circles GFAJ stands unflatteringly for Give Felisa A Job).

In September, after several months of open experimentation, Dr. Redfield discovered the arsenic-treated bacteria cells only grew when the cells were streaked out on agar plates. When she tried to use a liquid culture medium, she says, “The cells didn’t look so good.”

But for some reason they grew on the agar plates. And when Dr. Redfield fed the bacteria an amino acid she says they grew like crazy. Once she was able to stabilize the cell growth she grew enough GFAJ-1 to analyze its DNA. She wanted to see if the cells were assimilating arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus.

Dr. Redfield didn’t think that such a thing would be possible and for decades chemists have concluded the same thing. Yet, That’s what the Wolfe-Simon experiment concluded. Redfield relies on the chemistry which says that the bonds with the arsenic would be so weak that they would fall apart within a fraction of a second. According to the chemistry, she says, “The DNA will just fall apart and the cells will die.”

But she also refutes the Wolfe-Simon conclusion based on biology. Dr. Redfield imagines DNA is like a zipper. She says, “The teeth of the zipper have to be the same size or the zipper will get stuck.” Arsenic is too big to work in place of phosphorus.

After getting the arsenic-laden bacteria to grow, she figured out that the Wolfe-Simon experiment only worked because the agar plates the original researchers used for the cell growth contained a minute amount of phosphorus, which contaminated the experiment by giving the cells just enough to grow.

She says, “I think they used a reagent that wasn’t purified and discovered it had three or four micro molars of phosphorus.” In the paper and in responding to Redfield and other criticism, Wolfe-Simon says that the bacteria couldn’t grow on the little bit of phosphorus on the agar plate. To that Redfield says, “It was lame. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”

When she did her own experiment, Redfield used reagent grade chemicals and grew her bacteria in arsenate almost to the specified density. When she added just three micro molars of phosphorus she got the same result as the Wolfe-Simon paper.

Once she was able to stabilize the growth of GFAJ-1 cells containing different amounts of arsenic, she sent the bacteria off for analysis at Princeton to see if any of the arsenic made its way into the DNA of the bacteria, as posited by the Wolfe-Simon paper. She expects those results in a couple of weeks.

She says,” I’ve grown the bacteria with and without arsenic and extracted the DNA and sent it off.” Once she gets the DNA analysis she’ll do some more experiments and then write a paper about the whole process.

For the last year Dr. Redfield has helped demonstrate how science can be self-correcting. In the media coverage, experts quickly reached a strong consensus — that the arsenic paper was flawed. And with her open science experiment on a blog, Redfield invited curious colleagues to contribute to the experiment, which was working at the edges of what is known in biology and experimenting in unfamiliar territory.

Unfortunately, many people look to this newsmaking event as an example of how science gets things wrong. Some people only heard the original arsenic life story and missed the vibrant discussion of the research and its correction.

In the process of the hub-bub around whether arsenic is a building block of life one evolutionary biologist with a popular blog said, “Rosie Redfield must be the tyrant queen of science.” P.Z. Myers, the outspoken atheist blogger biologist gave her the title, which she wears proudly.

Through it all, Dr. Redfield has remained very sympathetic to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young post doc responsible for the paper about arsenic life. Redfield has not spoken directly to Wolfe-Simon but sent her an apologetic e-mail after an interview she gave appeared more strident than she intended.

Rosie Redfield understands what it’s like to be a misunderstood scientist. For the last 20 years she has focused on how bacteria reproduce. In 2000 her work raised eyebrows when she wondered, “Do bacteria have sex?” She believes they do, despite what conventional biology says.

To Wolfe-Simon she says, “I understand having an exciting, important idea where everyone thinks you’re wrong.” But, she cautions, “You have to do good science; that’s the only thing that will see you through.”

She feels sorry for how this biological brew-hah went down. Despite what Redfield considers an error in not admitting a mistake, she thinks that the other co-authors on the paper were also complicit in not correcting things before they reached publication and public discourse.

Redfield says, “You can be seen to screw up and it’s not a disaster. That’s just science.”

Science writer David Dobbs followed the story since it broke and says Wolfe-Simon is now caught in the fallout from an over-the-top media press of which she is both part author and something of a victim.

Redfield agrees with his characterization of how both NASA and Wolfe-Simon’s mentors and former lab bosses seem to have abandoned her. In a Wired article in September he notes, “It appears they bought and fueled the bus; put bright lights and banners on it; cheered as Wolfe-Simon drove it a bit wildly honking the horn; and have now thrown her under it.”

Redfield says, “Everyone involved made big mistakes. But the big betrayal wasn’t the errors but the failure to admit them.”

And of her new moniker as tyrant queen of science, she says, “Finally the recognition I’ve been waiting for.”

A new theory posits that an instantaneous light burst at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection left the imprint of his image in the cloth used to bury him.

Just in time for what believers call a Christmas miracle, a team of Italian scientists has concluded that the cloth believed to hold the image of Jesus at the moment of his resurrection was not faked. They studied the chemical properties of the image and found it would be impossible to forge.

Previous attempts to study the cloth concluded that it was not 2,000 years old but part of a Medieval hoax dating back about 700 years. Those vying for the Shroud of Turin to be authentic claim that radio carbon dating in 1988 was flawed because it was done on a section of the cloth that was repaired after fire damage during the Middle Ages.

The current testing of the shroud, which is said to hold the electromagnetic image of Jesus’s face, proves the image was not faked using any known 14th Century technology.

Lead researcher Paulo Di Lazzaro told MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle, “It is obvious that a serious scientific work cannot prove any supernatural action.”

But the group of researchers, sympathetic to the story of the shroud as Jesus’ burial cloth, thinks they have proved the image’s chemical authenticity.

The group doing the latest tests on the shroud worked outside of business hours on their “curiosity-driven” research, which was not funded by the ENEA Research Center, where they work.

They team started with a question: could radiation have produced the Christ-like image etched in the cloth?

The short answer is yes. But there’s more to the story.

Di Lazzaro and his colleagues blasted modern-day cloth with an ultraviolent laser and they claim that they were able to reproduce the exact depth of the coloration — .2 micrometers — in the Shroud of Turin. Over five years, the team tested and re-tested, blasting the experimental cloth with laser pulses of varying lengths. They say that pulses lasting less than 50 nanoseconds produce the right “superficial Shroud-like coloration of linen yarns in a narrow range of irradiation parameters.”

Because lasers didn’t exist in the Middle Ages the team concludes that the shroud couldn’t have been faked. Previous studies suggested that the image of the bearded man was painted on the cloth. But Di Lazzaro refutes that, claiming that no brush stroke could be evenly painted at that miniscule depth.

Di Lazzaro and his team conclude, “These processes may have played a role in the generation of the body image on the Shroud of Turin.”

But Joe Nickell, who has been studying shroud science, also known as sindology, for decades says that Di Lazzaro’s research team stacks the deck in favor of the shroud’s authenticity by starting with the premise that the shroud is an impossible image.

Shroud of Turin

He tells MSNBC.com, “Making the assumption of a miracle is a really, really, really, really, really big assumption. That it’s done in the name of science is just astonishing.”

But the shroud team holds strong saying, “The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining … is impossible to obtain in a laboratory.”

Nickell argues that the team starts with the answer and looks for scientific evidence to back up the claim. He says the latest tests don’t prove anything new despite their use of lasers and high-tech tests.

The Italian shroud team is careful not to draw conclusions about the shroud itself. And they stop short of offering any supernatural explanation for the image of a crucified Jesus in the cloth.

They say, “When one talks about a flash of light being able to color a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things like miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes. We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals.”

The research was presented at a science conference in May but kept under wraps until the British media pounced on this Christmas story, which will no doubt be an early Christmas present for shroud believers, but is likely to be greeted with a bah-humbug by those who doubt that the sepia-colored, 14ft-long cloth dates back to the date Jesus Christ’s crucifixion 2,000 years ago.

The focus of Lee Cronin’s work is understanding and controlling self-assembly and self-organisation in chemistry to develop functional molecular and nano-molecular chemical systems; linking architectural design with function and recently engineering system-level functions.

Lee Cronin's Lab Searches for Inorganic Building Blocks of Life

In other words, the 38-year old organic chemist started with the very predictable inorganic molecules as a basis to build nano-machines. Somewhere in the process he began to create self-assembling structures that also began to self-oranize and to evolve. He was on his way to creating inorganic life.

In the process he has created large inorganic, metallic cells from polyoxometalates assembled into bubbly spheres. These non-biological cells let chemicals in and out of their membranes. Some have been taught to photosynthesize.

First Inorganic Cell, iCHELL

And Cronin says, “What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving, inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.”

He tells the BBC, “The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties that could help us understand how life emerged and also to use this approach to define a new technology based upon evolution in the material world – a kind of inorganic living technology.

“Bacteria are essentially single-cell micro-organisms made from organic chemicals, so why can’t we make micro-organisms from inorganic chemicals and allow them to evolve?

“If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it’s not just a biological process. It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design.”

His team submitted a paper on Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells (iCHELLs) to the journal Angewandte Chemie.

In his TED Talk Making matter come alive in July, Cronin says that in his lab he is recreating the famous Urey-Miller chemistry experiment which led to the discovery of amino acids, the building blocks of life in the 1950s.

In 2011, Cronin’s own lab looks like something out of Frankenstein as he sends electricity through bubbling flasks filled with chemicals trying to find similar inorganic building blocks of life.

He postulates that we emerged from a primordial soup of chemicals before we had RNA, DNA or proteins. Before we became humans, our genetic makeup had to be contained in cells. Once there it could become self-replicating and evolve into our ancestors and eventually into us.

He is testing this hypothesis in the lab by using an inorganic “LEGO kit” of molecules. Taking the three or four building blocks, he and his team of collaborators in his lab and around the world are aggregating them all together into thousands of large nano-molecular molecules.

These molecules are about the same size as DNA and proteins but they contain no carbon, the element in all living things. The one piece he was lacking was containers to hold the molecules. Much like biology, he needed to make some cells.

So Cronin and his team made iCHELLS to hold these new inorganic molecules.

Once he achieved that over the summer, he began to conduct mini chemistry experiments inside the inorganic cells.

And now he is searching for a way to activate the process of Darwinian evolution within his iCHELLS by getting inorganic molecules to compete with one another.

He says, “Evolution cannot be cut apart. You have to find the fitness function.”

He says if this theory holds true then he will be able to take the idea of the selfish gene — a biological system that wants to survive and replicate — one step further to the notion of selfish matter.

Cronin’s effort to make inorganic matter able to evolve on its own is his way to build a more comprehensive definition of life.

He says, “We are really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive.”

Tattoos are a time-honored yet painful way to mark a significant moment in one’s life. They can capture the essence of who you are and permanently etch that onto your skin. Scientists are one tribe that shows their passion for their work by marking it on their bodies.

For years, science writer Carl Zimmer has been collecting the body art of scientists and science enthusiasts. Now he’s turned the collection from the Science Tattoo Emporium on his blog The Loom into a book.

It all started with an innocent question to his blog readers in 2007: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science? Zimmer found out that many of them were, and they were willing to share their ink with him and the world.

But in true Zimmer fashion, you can’t read the book without learning something. Even he admits that he learned a lot during the research phase.

Zimmer says one woman sent a picture of her tattoo, depicting a neuron in the eye that helps regulate sleep. He’d never heard of this before so he did some research.

He discovered that the neuron allows light into the eye, even when closed and even when a person is blind.

Those are the types of aha moments that Zimmer hopes his new book will inspire.

The seed of this science tattoo idea came to him at a pool party where a friend and neuroscientist had a DNA tattoo on his shoulder. Zimmer thought that was pretty neat. And then when he learned the significance — that the tattoo actually encoded the initials of the man’s wife — he saw the idea of science ink at a much deeper level.

He says he wrote the book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed to show how passionate scientists are about their work and about science in general.

Darwins finches and chemical structures of specific molecules seem to be the predominate tattoo of many people. But some of the tattoos in the book feature obscure yet visually striking pieces of science.

Zimmer recently told the PBS NewsHour that if he ever got a tattoo it would be the double helix of DNA encoded for his wife’s name. He says, “I think that’s the way to go.”

If you were to get a tattoo related to science what would it be and why?

2011 was a banner year for weather. It was cold, wet, dry and hot, depending what part of the country you inhabit. And according to new analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration there were 12 weather events that each cost over $1 billion, setting a new record.

Jack Hayes, head of the National Weather Service says in his 40-year weather career he’s never seen a year quite like 2011, where floods, wildfires, tornadoes and blizzards all set records.

Here are the disasters that we’ll be talking about for years.

Billion-dollar disasters of 2011 (as of Dec. 7, 2011), courtesy of NOAA

Groundhog Day blizzard » January 29-February 3, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes » April 4-5, 2011

Southeast/Midwest tornadoes » April 8-11, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes » April 14-16, 2011

Southeast/Ohio Valley/Midwest tornadoes » April 25-28, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes » May 22-27, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes and severe weather » June 18-22, 2011

Southern Plains/Southwest drought and heatwave » Spring-Fall, 2011

Mississippi River flooding » Spring-Summer, 2011

Upper Midwest flooding » Summer 2011

Hurricane Irene » August 20-29, 2011

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona wildfires » Spring-Fall 2011

Wallow Fire in Arizona, June 2011

Hurricane Irene blew up the eastern seaboard in late August, causing at least $7.3 billion in damage and killing 45 people.

Flooding in the upper Midwest along the Missouri and Souris rivers during the summer caused more than $2 billion in damaged and left at least five people died.

Gas Station Stays Dry during Record Flooding in Minot, ND

Flooding along the Mississippi River in spring and summer brought losses there between $3 billion and $4 billion and killed at least two people .

Drought and heat wave in the southern plains and Southwest from spring to fall cost the region $10 billion.

Buoy Sites High and Dry in Benbrook Lake, Texas

Tornadoes and severe storms in June tore through the Midwest and Southeast, causing at least $1.3 billion in damage and killing at least three people.

A tornado outbreak in the Southeast and Ohio Valley in late April left 321 people dead and caused $10.2 billion in damage.

Another string of tornadoes in the Midwest and Southeast in mid April killed 38 people and left a $2.1 billion path of destruction.

Tornado Leaves Joplin, MO in Ruin, May 2011

Just days later another set of twisters flattened parts of the Southeast and Midwest, causing over $2.2 billion in damage.

Another tornado outbreak in the Midwest and Southeast in May killed 177 people and caused more than $9.1 billion in damage.

The first big weather event of 2011 was the Groundshog Day blizzard, also known as Snopocalypse. It killed 36 people and caused more than $1.8 billion in damage.

Groundhog's Day Blizzard Ground Chicago to a Halt

Then there was the pre-Halloween blizzard that paralyzed cities, killed 27 people and caused $3 billion in damage.

And there are still a few weeks to go in the year before all the totals can be calculated.

NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco told scientists at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week that despite being a record-breaking year for weather disasters, 2011 was not an aberration.

She says, “What we are seeing this year is not just an anomalous year, but a harbinger of things to come for at least a subset of those extreme events that we are tallying.”

Dr. Lubchenco believes that some of the increase in frequency appears to be driven by climate change.

One of the largest reinsurance companies, Munich Re, agrees. In a 2010 report the company said, “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.”

Hurricane Irene Huffed and Puffed up the East Coast in August

But 2011 was also a La Nina year, which meant that weather patterns were cooler and wetter than average (except where La Nina made it hotter and drier.) That could explain it right? Not quite.

And, as for the high cost of damage. More people are living in populated areas so when a weather disaster hits it affects more people.

But that doesn’t explain away the appearance of more extreme weather events. But is climate change responsible for this extreme weather?

Prevailing scientific wisdom says that you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.

Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says, “But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago.

NOAA Tracks Billion Dollar Weather Disasters 1980-2011

In the last 30 years the amount of water in the atmosphere has increased by about four percent. Dr. Trenberth says that seemingly small increase “invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change.”

Last year, he told the New York Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

The question is the subject of movies, science fiction novels and our own curious minds. Are we alone in the universe? Prevailing scientific wisdom says yes but more and more the answer appears to be no.

With the advent of more sensitive cosmological equipment to scan the night sky, astronomers are able to see smaller objects with ever greater detail. The Kepler space telescope has been focused on a region of space containing over 100,000 stars. Scientists have been watching those stars for the tiniest hint of a wobble, indicating those stars could be hiding planets.

Now, the hunt for exoplanets — planets being discovered outside of our own solar system — is on and the results are startling.

Ten years ago, two University of Washington astrobiologists postulated that Earth is a rare planet indeed. In their book Rare Earth, Don Brownlee and Peter Ward suggested that for life to exist elsewhere in the universe very specific conditions must be met. They called this the habitable or Goldilocks zone, where a planet wasn’t too hot or too cold to support life. It had to have a certain amount of sunlight from its nearby star. So it had to be located in a solar system with other planets a certain distance from its star.

Building on that set of criteria, professional astronomers, undergraduates, citizens and curious skywatchers are all becoming planet hunters. Now the science is improving to the point where a new discovery yields the planets size, mass and even its average surface temperature.

Finding a Planet in a Star Stack

Kepler 22 Star System, Showing Kepler 22b in the Habitable Zone

British author and astronomy expert Ian Ridpath explains the way astronomers find new exoplanets.

“NASA has this space telescope called Kepler which has been staring for the past couple of years at this one particular area of sky containing over 100,000 stars. And it’s been looking for very slight dips in the star’s brightness as something goes across in front of the stars.

“It’s called the transit method. Now if it does that three times in succession then the NASA scientists think that is good enough to conclude that what is causing the dip in light is a planet.”

That’s why astronomers are so excited about the confirmation of a new exoplanet, Kepler 22b. By all calculations it is located in a habitable zone around its star, known as Kepler 22. The star, which is smaller and cooler than our sun is located between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler 22b orbits around the star and may be the right distance from the star to support life. But the size of the planet — about 2.4 times that of Earth, really excites scientists. It is rare for a discovery to find a planet in the same size range as our own blue planet. Of the 28 planets found so far his is the smallest planet ever confirmed by Kepler.

Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA says, “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin.”

It’s much easier to spot a big planet, like a gas giant the size of Jupiter. But those are not likely candidates for the search for life, microbial or intelligent. Kepler 22b is about the right size and appears to have a liquid water surface. In fact, it looks like the entire planet is covered in water.

That coupled with measurements pointing to the temperature being about 72 degrees gives astronomers hope that life may exist there.

NASA Artist Rendering of Kepler 22b, Covered in Water and with Clouds

William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center says the Kepler team got very lucky in detecting this planet. He says, “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

The latest additions to the periodic table of the elements finally have placeholder names. It was earlier this year when elements 114 and 116 were admitted onto the coveted list of elements. At the time they were referred to by their numerical Latin ununquadium and ununhexium.

They might be called flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv), unless the public can come up with better names. Now that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has accepted these two names, the public gets to weigh in on these heavy elements.

The IUPAC and its physics equivalent have spent years sifting through data and in June decided to admit the two new elements which were jointly created by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna.

But naming the elements has been just about as difficult as confirming their existence. Each lab decided it would get to name one of the elements.

The team at Livermore submitted three names and out of that Livermorium became one contender. Since Dubnium already occupies the 105th element on the periodic table, the Russian team decided to submit their suggested name based on the scientist who started the lab, Georgii Flerov. Thus Flerovium was submitted as the other contender.

For the next five months, the IUPAC will take suggestions from the public, allowing citizens to get in touch with their inner scientist. Anyone can comment on these names or raise objections before the two selected names become official.

Terry Renner, the chemistry union’s executive director says, “It’s a desire to be fair and recognize everyone’s right to contribute as a scientist.”

And silly or serious all suggestions will be considered. To submit your thoughts about the proposed elements Livermorium and Flerovium leave a comment below.

After the five-month public comment period, the inorganic chemistry division will review the comments made and either revise the recommendations or recommend approval by the full IUPAC Council.

Dr. Renner says that barring any naming issues that arise in the meantime the new elements will be confirmed and officially become part of the periodic table next May.

Yves “Jetman” Rossy is a Swiss aviator and engineer who has created personalize jet flight. In 2008 he became the first person to fly independently without the aid of an airplane. He just had a fixed wing attached to his back.

Jetman, Yves Rossy Soars above The Alps

He’s been perfecting his airplane-less wing for 15 years and since 2010 has been a regular sight high above the Swiss Alps. Earlier this year he made news by flying himself across the Grand Canyon.

Jetman in Formation with Breitling Jet Team

Before attempting his latest stunt he returned from the Abu Dhabi Science Festival where he gave a talk and soared over the United Arab Emirates, inspiring a new generation of jet enthusiasts.

After his exhilarating run with the jet planes recently, Rossy told CNN, “Hey, I’m flying almost naked with nothing. But I am with jets and fast.” And he describes his experience as, “Like unreal.”

Jetman Races Two Fighter Jets

For his latest feat he dropped from a helicopter and then turned on his jets to zip into formation with the larger jets. But in the past he has begun his flights from other airplanes and even a hot air balloon.

Jetman Leads the Flight Formation

Two years ago the private e-mails of one of the top climate change research centers were stolen and published online. The timing was such that it occurred just before the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. Now, just two weeks before the Durban, South Africa Climate Summit, the hackers have released a new batch of old e-mails.

But this time the culprits, who authorities have failed to catch, left a message.

It says, “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.

This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.

We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as…

And unlike last time, the climate scientists accused of scientific misconduct and facilitating a conspiracy surrounding manmade global warming are striking back.

University of East Anglia climatologist Phil Jones, left, and University of East Anglia vice-chancellor Edward Acton address the media during a news conference, London, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011. Photo: Raphael Satter / AP

Phil Jones, the man at the center of the 2009 investigation who was cleared of wrongdoing after being investigated for manipulating data and other scientific misconduct, held a news conference following the pre-Thanksgiving leak of 5,000 additional e-mails, dating between 2003 and 2009.

Dr. Jones, who runs the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in England, says his heart did sink a bit when he heard there was a new batch of e-mails released on November 22.

So far he says he hasn’t been embarrassed by any of the newly released e-mails but few new tidbits of his private discussions with colleagues have come out yet in what he says are “frank and honest discussions between scientists.” Although much larger than the last batch, Jones says these are still heavily cherry-picked e-mails.

UEA Vice-Chancellor Edward Acton who stood next to Jones at the press conference 24 hours after the latest release says, “Different phrases, same issues.” He predicted much less of a storm about an attempt to revive the furor over “Climategate” again, saysing, “There’s so much deja vu about it.”

In 2009, a hacker broke into the servers at the Climate Research Unit and downloaded untold thousands of e-mails between sent among climate researchers. Just before the Copenhagen Climate Summit, where the world’s nations were to draft a new global treaty to reduce carbon emissions, the e-mails appeared, casting a pall over the climate summit. Over 1,000 e-mails chronicled some nasty internal debates over minute aspects of climate science. It led to several investigations which independently concluded that scientists had committed no wrongdoing.

The University of East Anglia did get its knuckles rapped for its closed-door policy regarding data sharing and access to information. It has since changed its policies to be much more open.

Andrew Watson, a carbon-cycle scientist at UEA, said: “What comes across to me is that climate scientists are a diverse, complex and argumentative bunch, much like any other group of people.”

Now the hacker, who goes by the online handle FOIA 2011, has returned, claiming to still have 220,000 more e-mails that were stolen during the 2009 server breach. He or she has had two years to look them over and this latest batch appears to have a lot of repeats from the first release, including the infamous “hide the decline” phrase which taken out of context gave climate skeptics some fuel to fire the false debate a little longer.

Over at the Union of Concerned Scientists the director of the scientific integrity program says this latest attempt to disrupt U.N. climate talks and create doubt in the minds of the public about global warming merits a collective yawn.

Francesca Griffo says, “It’s time to condemn the real perpetrators in this story: the hackers who stole and released university property. The hackers and their allies are resorting to desperate measures to distract the public when our focus should be on how to respond to climate change.”

The Norfolk Police who have been handling this case view the hack as a criminal act too. A police spokesman tells BBC’s Richard Black that “the contents [of the new release] will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing”. Black also got a hold of a document that shows just how much the police have spent on this investigation in the last 12 months.

He says, “they have spent precisely £5,649.09 on the investigation.” And, all but £80.05 was spent back in February. No work has been included on invoices in the last six months. Black adds, “Of all the figures surrounding the current story, that is perhaps the one that most merits further interrogation.”

But it’s not just scientists who are concerned over the slow progress of this investigation. U.S. Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) says in a statement released right after the new batch of CRU e-mails, “If this happened surrounding nuclear arms talks, we would have the full force of the Western world’s intelligence community pursuing the perpetrators. And yet, with the stability of our climate hanging in the balance with these international climate treaty negotiations, these hackers and their supporters are still on the loose. It is time to bring them to justice.”

But for the moment, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa and the other scientists who were vilified for their role in “Climategate” have the upper hand. The science which has been thoroughly vetted since the first release of e-mails and has proven that there is no conspiracy to manipulate data in favor of global warming and though they disagree — and often hotly — the scientists do not disagree about the overall trend the planet is experiencing — the world is getting warmer over time and human activity is largely the cause.

Global warming has become so politicized that many people forget there is science underlying the concept. The camps sort out like this. Climate scientists for the most part agree that the world is heating up thanks to man-made or anthropogenic global warming, largely caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which increases the greenhouse effect and heats the planet. There are a few climate scientists who are considered skeptics of the the science.

They argue that the land surface temperatures — where the increase has been measured — are highly unreliable for a couple of reasons. First the weather stations that record the temperatures are not always accurate and the record-keeping over the years has been far from complete. Some stations have instrument problems which lead to further data problems. And second, climate skeptics think that cities, which trap heat causing what is known as the urban heat island effect, are skewing global temperature readings.

But in what is perhaps the most comprehensive land surface temperature analysis, a group of scientists at University of California Berkley gathered all the raw data from 15 separate data archives consisting of 1.6 billion temperature records. They merged the information into one, large data set, called Berkley Earth, and put the whole thing online for the world to see.

Comparison of All Major Climate Data Sets Shows Berkley Earth in Black

What makes this project significant is that the man behind the experiment is Richard Muller, a prominent physicist and self-ascribed climate skeptic. After the “climategate” e-mail hacking scandal in November 2009 he wanted to see for himself what the temperature record said.

He told the Associated Press, “The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago.”

Dr. Muller and his daughter Elizabeth, who is the executive director of the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature project approached the project from a skeptical point of view. They even received a quarter of their $623,000 funding from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, a non-profit organization that gives money to climate skeptics and conservative political groups like the Tea Party. Some money also came from other private foundations, including $100,000 from the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research created by Bill Gates.

At the completion of the project, Dr. Muller declared that climate change is real. He says, “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”

Most scientists aren’t very impressed that he came to the same conclusion they did decades ago. But they do appear impressed to have converted a skeptic by letting the data speak for itself.

Science depends on the ability to reproduce results. And while science calls for dispassion and objective thinking, skeptics have been accusing many climate scientists of being alarmists and of manipulating data to show the problem is worse than it is. When it comes to climate science, politics, personal agendas and motivations have polluted the process. Now every discovery, paper published or statement made is applauded by some and denounced by others. That makes it difficult for the science to shine through the politics and even harder for the public to grasp any significance.

But Dr. Muller’s BEST project only goes so far. It analyzed all the available data and demonstrates that the climate has been warming consistently and considerably for the past 50 years. Muller and his team found that the world is 1.6 degrees F warmer now than it was in the 1960s.

This landmark study does not point any fingers at the cause of the warming. It merely points out that warming is indeed real. It carefully stays away from taking a position on whether the warming is part of a natural cycle or whether it is being exacerbated by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

But Muller now says, “Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world.” He doesn’t believe that case has been scientifically proven yet, however.

In March, Dr. Muller testified before Congress (PDF) saying, “I believe that the systematic biases that are the cause for most concern can be adequately handled by data analysis techniques. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends.”

Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, is the climatologist at the heart of the “climategate” scandal. He was accused of fraud but since cleared of all charges. He helped build one of the three climate data sets that scientists around the world regularly use, the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit. The other two are the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the NOAA National Climate Data Center.

Speaking of Muller and the Berkley Earth project Dr. Jones tells New Scientist magazine, “These initial findings are very encouraging and echo our own results, and our conclusion that the impact of urban heat islands on the overall global temperature is minimal.”

The BEST research also confirms the so-called hockey stick graph. First unveiled in 1998 by Penn State University paleoclimatologist, Michael Mann, the graph became an icon of global warming after it was featured in the summary of a crucial report by a United Nations climate panel in 2001. A version also appeared in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Mann’s hockey stick graph also became the symbol climate change skeptics loved to use to body check scientists to keep the debate alive. Even Muller once called the graph “the poster child of the global warming community.”

Now Mann says, “I think it’s at least useful to see that even a critic like Muller, when he takes an honest look, finds that climate science is robust.”

Now that we’ve been living in the Information Age for over 50 years, it’s safe to say we’ve become quite proficient at gathering data. We’ve built elaborate systems to collect and transmit data. We’ve also built elaborate systems to protect and encrypt personal information so it can’t be misused.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the power of the people in gathering, processing and analyzing huge amounts of data. Peer to peer computing networks and citizen scientists are helping the scientific world gather an entire world of data. But automated systems are churning out more data than we know what to do.

Some clever artists are sensing that within each piece of data there is a single artifact of humanity. When pooled together, those data points become a catalog, documenting human moments. The patterns that can be derived from the information clearly document our culture.

It turns highly impersonal data into a very intimate portrait of humanity.

Artist Aaron Koblin gave a TED Talk at this year’s technology, art and design demonstration. The video is 18 minutes but is very powerful. Here’s some background on what he mentions during his talk.

“The 19th Century culture was defined by the novel.
The 20th Century culture was defined by the cinema.
The culture of the 21st Century will be defined by the interface.” — Lev Manovich, media theory professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

He sets the scene by saying, “Interface can be a powerful narrative device.” Marshaling the power of the Internet, powerful home computers running on a protocol that showcase the power of audio and video, Koblin puts an artsy twist on the hustle and bustle of modern life while leveraging the latest technology to help refine the information, tranforming it into art.

First he visually represents one statistic – there are 140,000 airplanes flying at any given time – and turns it into an art project called Flight Patterns. Then he creates a map with routing information, makes it come alive by color-coding different aspects. The overall image is a dynamic system that could just as easily be a snapshot of our brains in action as the U.S. flight system.

Working with the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT he maps international communication in a way that could easily appear to be a giant solar flare erupting on the sun. By visualizing tiny bits of information a story emerges and it is one where the digital world looks like a mirror image of the natural world, an idea that should comfort some.

Drawing on a computer program developed by Amazon.com called Mechanical Turk, Koblin exploited the system for his own artistic pleasure. Mechanical Turk creates human intelligence tasks that allows access tens of thousands of people to perform simple jobs, like rating an item, drawing a simple picture or just giving an opinion. The idea is that there are some things people can do better, faster and more accurately than a computer. For their small effort they are given a small reward. Each task takes just a minute and participants are paid in pennies.

For his digital sheep project, The Sheep Market, Koblin asked for people to give him their two cents by drawing a sheep. For that, he would in turn pay them two cents. He collected 10,000 sheep for his project and then sold the sheep as stamps on an open sheep market in blocks of 20. He did similar projects with asking people to draw portions of a $100 bill as part of his Ten Thousand Cents project. This was to measure accuracy rather than creativity. Then he built an audio task to collect voice recordings which he turned into a crowdsourced version of “Bicycle Built for Two.”

He also decided to demonstrate the power of the modern web browser by challenging people to create music videos without using a digital camera, or any camera for that matter. He again had people draw images which he then stitched together into 24 frames per second. And the result was a collective tribute to Johnny Cash, honoring the last song he ever recorded before he died.

In another music video project, he personalized the video for the individual viewers by having them enter their street address before playing the song, We Used to Wait by Arcade Fire. In this ongoing project, Google Earth and advanced web browser features help serve up personal childhood information in the context of the music, giving the video a more intimate feel.

Through all of his artistic exploration with technology, Koblin’s message is clear. The data that is out there is not to be feared. He says, “I think data can actually make us more human.”

Koblin works for Google, where he is currently directing the Data Arts team.

“As we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.” — Aaron Koblin, media artist

An exhibition which doubles as a huge, interactive science experiment has opened in New York. The Dublin Science Gallery’s Biorhythm: Music and the Body show immerses its visitors in a world of sonic experiences to see how they respond to different musical stimuli. Tara Cleary from Reuters reports.

But it’s not just all fun. The exhibition is also a giant science experiment, gathering physical responses to music and measuring that against how people report they feel about the music.

Ben Knapp, the research director at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Ireland wires listeners up and then studies their reactions, their galvanic skin resistance and their heart rate as they listen to different kinds of music. The experiment called Emotion in Motion also records the listeners feelings about the music and compare that data to what their body says.

Knapp says the Internet and social media have created a social chasm where people prefer virtual relationships over real ones. This project will pinpoint empathy through music. He believes songs that make one person feel sad could be used to convey empathy to another person if they are unable to do so on their own.

He says, “If my physiology plays a particular song that’s sad for me, that may not make you sad. But if I then know what song makes you sad and I can say ‘Oh, okay, I’ll play this for you, maybe now we can identify more together.’”

The exhibition Biorhythm: Music and Body runs now through August 6 in New York City at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.

There are no names or even symbols for the two latest members to be admitted to the exclusive chemistry club — The Periodic Table of the Elements. Numbers 114 and 116 now have a place on that familiar chemical chart that everyone in high school sees but may not understand. Both are highly radioactive and exist for less than a second before decaying into more familiar elements.

After a three-year review a joint commission made up of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics determined that the two new elements, tentatively named ununquadium and ununhexium, met the strict criteria for inclusion in the periodic table.

Periodic Table, courtesy of www.ptable.com

During the last few years, there have been several claims by laboratories for the discovery of new chemical elements at positions 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118 on the periodic table. But until now, none met the standards for full inclusion.

In 1999, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claimed to discover elements 116 and 118 while blasting lead with krypton particles. But that discovery was later retracted after several confirmation experiments failed to yield the same results.

Now, the periodic table has two more members of the transuranic element family. Those are elements heavier than uranium, which can generally only be produced artificially in either a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator.

Current tables represent the theorized elements, including 114 and 116 already, but this is the first true addition in over ten years.

The new elements have temporary titles of ununquadium and ununhexium, but final names will be decided later. A movement afoot on online wants the public to choose the new names. It started on Wired.com and quickly migrated to Twitter.

Actually, the members of the U.S. and Russian team that confirmed the discovery will have the first shot at naming the new elements but it will have to go through a rigorous element naming approval process before the final names are selected.

Element 114 had several groups around the world claiming they had produced it in a lab. But a team from Dubna, Russia and a team from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California offered sufficient proof of its existence. The two groups who collaborated on this project were also credited with proving the existence of element 116.

They proved the existence of both elements by hurtling lighter atoms into heavier ones to see what would result. To discover 116 they smashed curium (atomic number 96) into calcium (atomic number 20). It rapidly decayed into element 114. They created element 114 by the collision of plutonium (atomic number 94) with calcium.

Why are teams of chemists and physicists doing this?

There is a theory about a so-called island of stability that exists where new heavy elements can exist for minutes, hours, days or weeks before decaying into lighter elements. Finding new out-of-the-box elements is the Holy Grail of chemistry and if it is found could open up the periodic table to a large range of new elements.

NASA is setting its sights on the future of the U.S. Space Program. The agency is unveiling a new space ship, but pushing back when that ship will go into service.

The next generation of manned space vehicles used to be part of the Orion program. Now, the name has changed to MPCV and so has the date when the ships will be ready to explore beyond the International Space Station — perhaps venturing to Mars or an asteroid.

NASA’s Orion program was supposed to have taken astronauts back to the moon beginning in 2014. Now the new launch date is unknown but probably won’t be set until later this decade.

Even though Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity was proven accurate during a solar eclipse in Africa in 1919, the many predictions Einstein made are still being tested experimentally.

After 52 years of planning, delays, experimentation and building a Stanford University team with NASA becomes the latest group to prove that Einstein’s theory is correct.

NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which the spacecraft was designed to test.

Einstein predicted that the mass of Earth, with its own gravitational force, is enough to bend space-time. Gravity Probe B proved the so-called geodetic effect. Using ultra-precise gyroscopes, NASA scientists confirmed Einstein’s prediction.

He also said that a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates. He called this frame-dragging

This news is enough to make your head spin. Literally.

The European Space Agency is already working on that project, called Space-Time Explorer Quest. Scientists are testing test the effect of gravity at the sub-atomic level and hope to have some exciting results that will help the the two theories come together to form the much-sought-after Unified Theory in about 10 years.

Update: Shuttles heading to Washington D.C, New York, Florida and California

After 30 years and 135 flights into space, the US space shuttle is coming to an end. With just two more flights left, NASA is retiring the space shuttle program. Now, the AP’s Lee Powell says the familiar black-and-white crafts are becoming sought-after museum pieces.

While NASA is donating the shuttles free of charge to three lucky museums, each contending museum must raise about $28 million to have the decommissioned space orbiters shipped to their new homes. With only three remaining shuttles looking for new landing pads, a new space race has begun.

For the last year, about a dozen space, science and flight museums have been wooing NASA to get a hold of space shuttles Endeavour, Discovery and Atlantis. There is a fourth shuttle — Enterprise — which was an early prototype for the other shuttles but never flew into space.

The Smithsonian Institution will acquire Discovery and ship Enterprise to New York City’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum while Kennedy Space Center will acquire Atlantis. The California Science Center in Los Angeles will claim the last shuttle Endeavour.

NASA Live Stream here:


Free video streaming by Ustream

Washington state Governor Chris Gregoire says she is disappointed that Seattle lost the bid to get one of the shuttles. As the home to modern flight, Seattle would have been a perfect fit.

“While the Museum of Flight was in the top running, I’m disappointed that NASA did not choose them. However, the full fuselage trainer, that every astronaut including Bonnie Dunbar has been trained on, will soon call the Museum of Flight home. The largest of the trainers, this addition will allow visitors to actually climb aboard the trainer and experience the hands-on training that astronauts get. Visitors will not be allowed in the other shuttles and this trainer is a true win for our dynamic museum. It will help inspire young people to the adventure of space and to the excitement of a career in science, technology, engineering and math.”

A high-powered, space-based particle detector has found the first evidence of antimatter being produced naturally on Earth — in thunderstorms. We generally think of antimatter as cosmic rays that are produced by the sun or during a nuclear reaction. But it is used commonly in medical brain scans. Until recently, scientists had never captured any sign of natural antimatter being produced terrestrially.

At this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, astrophysicist Michael Briggs unveiled his findings. NASA’s Fermi telescope caught thunderstorms ejecting bursts of antimatter into space. Now scientists believe that the antimatter was created during a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF).

Gamma Ray Burst Sets off TGF along Earth's Magnetic Field during a Big Thunderstorm

The phenomenon has something to do with lightning although scientists don’t quite understand why antimatter is made in the process. But the process goes something like this.

A TGF produces high-speed electrons and positrons, (the antimatter equivalent of electrons) which then ride the arc of Earth’s magnetic field where they intercept the orbiting telescope.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has been circling the Earth for less than three years, is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately annihilate and transformed into gamma rays. In the case of thunderstorms, the gamma-ray burst is called a TGF.

While TGFs create beams of electrons and positrons, not all thunderstorms produce TGFs. Though most aren’t detected by the space telescope, NASA believes that about 500 TGFs occur every day around the world.

Most of the time, we think of antimatter as something that exists only in the deepest corners of the cosmos or in science fiction.

The universe is filled with matter — everything that has mass is matter. But scientists don’t know what happened to all the antimatter. Conventional wisdom holds that matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But when one comes into contact with the other, they annihilate instantly. Yet the universe is filled with matter but has no large source of antimatter.

Now we see there is at least one natural way to produce antimatter here on Earth — giant thunderstorms.

Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using SELEX from Maureen McKeague on Vimeo.

About 50 recent doctors of philosophy decided to make their often obscure doctoral dissertations a little more hip and lively so they entered Science magazine’s Dance Your Ph. D. contest. Making Her research on a chemistry method called Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) come alive through an interpretive dance, scientist and dancer Maureen McKeague from Carelton Unviersity in Ottawa, Canada took home the top prize last fall.

Her dance, titled “Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment” doesn’t sound like something that could be easily translated for a non-scientist let alone set to the music of Lady Gaga, among others.

The target is a small molecule called homocysteine, the main dancer with a target painted on her shirt. (That’s Maureen McKeague.) SELEX is a chemical technique that creates short RNA and DNA segments called aptamers (the other dancers). Aptamers are nucleic acids that can be designed to stick to any molecule–in this case the amino acid homocysteine. Watch for the Taq Polymerase scene in the middle of the dance. High levels of homocysteine in blood is associated with heart disease.

Dr. McKeague’s work aims to use the SELEX process to make aptamers to easily and cheaply measure homocysteine levels in blood samples. She and the 12 students in Maria DeRosa’s bionanotechnology research group helped give McKeague her win, which was announced in a special event in New York in October.

45 Ph.D. students entered the 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. contest. McKeague won with 69 percent of the online vote. You can view all the finalists here.

David Nichols studies the way psychedelic drugs act in the brains of rats. But he’s haunted by how humans hijack his work to make street drugs, sometimes causing overdose deaths. He was hoping that his work would lead to new ways of treating psychiatric disorders not become club drugs.

Today the journal Nature published an essay by Dr. Nichols where he describes the ethical dilemma he and and other neuroscientists face.

“I had never considered the possibility that something I’ve done might lead directly or even indirectly to somebody dying.” — David Nichols, Purdue University

A new blood test is so sensitive that it can spot a single cancer cell lurking among a billion healthy ones. This breakthrough in cancer diagnostics is moving one step closer to being available at your doctor’s office.

Right now, this test is being used with cancer patients who would otherwise have to wait months to see if a treatment is working. The current method of using CT scans requires a lot of time. The blood test which is being tested by a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson will tell doctors with a simple blood test if their prescribed treatment is working.

Down the road this type of test shows some promise in helping to identify cancer much earlier than current tests, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

Is there a gene that determines how generous you are? That’s one of the questions that a new research initiative at the University of Notre Dame hopes to answer. The new Science of Generosity Initiative has just finished funding 13 projects that will help science (mostly social science) better understand the effects of generosity on the giver and the receiver.

Over the course of the next two years this group of researchers from across the country will study various elements of generosity, from socio-economic conditions that allow people to give to what neural circuitry is involved in doing generous behavior like donating blood or helping the less fortunate.

Based on the premise that underpinned Notre Dame professor Christian Smith’s book Passing the Plate, which examined why Christians in the U.S. don’t give more, the generosity research is aimed at helping non-profit organizations — from the Salvation Army to the Peace Corps — figure out why donors give.

Children of Blackawton School in Devon, England learn about bee behavior

A group of UK primary school children have achieved a world first by having their school science project accepted for publication in an internationally recognized peer-reviewed Royal Society journal. No one will dispute that this is the youngest group of fledgling scientists to ever be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The paper, which reports novel findings in how bumblebees perceive color, is published in Biology Letters this week. The young science scholars didn’t just help with the research on bumblebees spatial and color recognition, they designed the experiment, collected data and even wrote the scientific paper that was just published.

“This paper represents a world first in high quality scientific publishing and I’m proud that Biology Letters is supporting this highly innovative approach to science education. This is a unique way of encouraging children’s engagement with science by getting a group to write about their work in a publishable format. I hope that it will inspire other groups to realise that science is not an exclusive club but something that’s available for everybody.” — Professor Brian Charlesworth FRS, Editor of Biology Letters

It’s not every day that the words “science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no-one has ever done before” appears in a scientific journal. But since it was written by kids, the published article reflected their excitement. The BBC has a podcast that accompanies its story about the bumble bees of Blackawton. But the interview with Beau Lotto the lead bee researcher on the Biological Letters site will give you a thorough overview of the experiment (17:03).

Since President Obama began running for high office, restoring scientific integrity at the White House has been a priority. In 2009 he issued a directive calling for a return of scientific integrity to the White House. Since then he has been criticized for keeping his policy plans secret.

Earlier this month at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, the President’s science advisor gave a special policy keynote speech and apologized for not being able to announce the scientific integrity policy to the 19,000 gathered. But last week, the President made good on that campaign promise with a new four-page directive for all executive office departments and agencies.

Coming from Dr. Holdren, the memo (PDF) outlines principles that will govern the new Scientific Integrity policy.

Foundations of scientific Integrity

1. Ensure a culture of scientific integrity.

2. Strengthen the actual and perceived credibility of government research.

3. Facilitate the free flow of scientific and technological information, consistent with privacy and classification standards.

4. Establish Principles for conveying scientific and technological information to the public.

Public Communications

1. Agencies will offer articulate and knowledgeable and non-partisan scientific spokespersons in response to media requests.

2. Federal scientists may speak to the media and public about their scientific work with appropriate coordination with supervisors and public affairs offices.

3. Mechanisms are in place to resolve disputes that arise from decisions to proceed or cancel interviews or public information events.

Use of Federal Advisory Committees

1. Recruitment for FAC members should be transparent.

2. Professional biographical information for appointed members should be made widely available to the public.

3. Selection to serve on an FAC should be made on expertise, knowledge and contribution to relevant subject area.

4. Agencies should make all conflict of interest waivers that committee members sign publicly available.

5. Except where prohibited, all reports, recommendations and products produced by FACs should be treated as findings of the committees alone and not the entire U.S. Government, and are thus not subject to inter-agency or intra-agency revision.

Professional Development of Government Scientists and Engineers

1. Encourage publication of research findings in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

2. Encourage presentation of research findings at professional scientific meetings.

3. Allow federal scientists and engineers to become editors or editorial board members of journals.

4. Allow full participation in professional science societies, including removing barriers for serving as officers of governing boards of such societies.

5. Allow federal scientists and engineers to receive honors and awards for their research and discoveries with the goal to minimize disparities between private sector and public sector scientists accruing professional benefits from such honors and awards.

Implementation

1. All agencies must submit their plans for implementing the new science integrity policy within 120 days of the date on the memo (Dec. 17).

NASA’s Kepler mission positioned a powerful telescope outside Earth’s atmosphere last year to begin taking pictures of a section of space known to house about 200,000 stars. For Yale astronomers this presents an incredible opportunity — to discover which of those stars have planets orbiting them.

Debra Fischer is an expert planet hunter. She says, “The Kepler mission will likely quadruple the number of planets that have been found in the last 15 years.”

These exoplanets — as planets outside our solar system are called — also provide a great opportunity to enlist the services of the public to help sift through the massive amounts of data in search of new planets.

Dr. Fischer adds, “And it’s terrific that NASA is releasing this amazing data into the public domain.”

To help analyze data, astronomers created Planet Hunters, a website where anyone can help discover new planets. It is part of Zooniverse, an online set of citizen science projects relating to space and weather.

Kevin Schawinksi, one of the founders of Galaxy Zoo, the first Zooniverse project says with the help of the Internet the project has assemble the largest distributed supercomputer dedicated to pattern recognition.

He says, “We’ve linked up over 300,000 human brains and turned it into a science machine.”

The whole Zooniverse is made of the following projects: (WARNING: Participation may be fun)
Planet Hunters
The Milky Way Project
Old Weather
Moon Zoo
Galaxy Zoo: Hubble
Solar Stormwatch
Galaxy Zoo: Mergers
Galaxy Zoo: Supernovae

A man is cured, doctors are stunned and patients have new hope. It could be the cure for HIV. It worked on one man in Germany and now a San Francisco company is trying to do replicate the results in the United States.

“We have this patient in Berlin who develops leukemia, gets a bone marrow transplant from donor who has a genetic anomaly, he lacks CCR5 genes. It turns out CCR5 is the key doorway for HIV to get into the cell,” explains Quest Research’s Dr. Jacob Lalezari.

Now, four years later with no other treatment that patient is HIV free. The goal now is to replicate what happened in Berlin.

Doctors in Germany gave a patient a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia. The patient also was HIV-positive so doctors selected a donor known to have a specific gene mutation, known for blocking HIV from entering cells.

The risky transplant involves killing off a patient’s unhealthy bone marrow and all the white blood cells, leaving the patient without an immune system until doctors infuse donated stem cells to rebuild the bone marrow which can then produce healthy cells.

Because the stem cells that were introduced in an HIV-postive U.S. man in his 40s contained the HIV-blocking mutation, the healthy cells became resistant to HIV and wiped out the virus in the process.

Scientists have discovered it’s relatively easy to remove HIV from the bloodstream but it tends to lurk in the brain, gut and lymphatic tissue.

This breakthrough has eradicated the virus from the patient’s entire body.

Experts at Quest Research are removing CCR5 from patients genes, replicating them and then putting them back. Dr. Lalezari says without CCR5 the virus can’t infect new cells and it eventually goes away.

Only time will tell if the new treatment can actually cure patients. So far Quest Research is treating ten patients with the gene therapy and experts call their results encouraging.

Professor Basil Donovan from the University of New South Wales in Australia says, “There is no guarantee that it would work in everyone you did it in, but the fact that it worked at all is encouraging.”

Dr. Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham in England says, “This is the first time the mutated gene has been harnessed to cure HIV infection.”

Doctors warn that this one case is an outlier and should by no means be viewed as a panacea to cure everyone living with HIV. The procedure itself kills about 30 percent of patients and is very expensive.

But experts are nevertheless blown away by this case, which you can read more about in the December issue of the journal, Blood.

If someone said the word “physicist” you are likely to think of Albert Einstein with his finger-in-a-light-socket hairstyle. A few savvy science enthusiasts will think of Brian Greene. But none will think of any of the 38 physicists working in the subterranean world at the Large Hadron Collider at the European research facility CERN.

At least not yet. Now that the atom-colliding and inspired tunes are coming out on a double disc album called Resonance – just in time for a Holiday gift — some new names may join the short list of phsycists…who can jam.

Scientists working on the ATLAS project are trying to show how physics and music are closely related. And after capturing particle collisions and putting them to sound, they are discovering a natural music in the universe.

The medical community is questioning a San Diego doctor’s ‘”miracle’” treatment for multiple sclerosis.

Dr. David Hubbard prescribed a revolutionary treatment–venoplasty–to help alleviate the symptoms of MS that his 27-year-old son Devon was experiencing.

If an MRI scan of the patient’s brain reveals that a patient has decreased blood flow to the brain, Dr. Hubbard performs a surgical procedure to open up veins that carry blood out of the brain. He has now treated 60 patients using this technique and he claims 58 of them have seen symptoms decrease or disappear.

Although the work Dr. Hubbard is performing is part of a scientific study of the MS, the neuro-degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous system, he is collecting data not running a clinical trial.

Still patients are coming from all over the nation and Canada to pay $15,000 for this surgical treatment. Other doctors believe Dr. Hubbard is pedaling false hope not a cure.

Dr. Hubbard is not alone in thinking that MS is related to narrow brain veins.

Dr. Paulo Zamboni thinks the vein-narrowing allows blood to drain more slowly. He believes this causes iron to build up in the brain and cause MS.

Like Dr. Hubbard, for Dr. Zamboni, MS is a family affair. The BBC reports that he treated his wife using a vein widening procedure.

Unlike Dr. Hubbard, Dr. Zamboni ran MRIs on 500 MS patients in different postures to study blood flow. And he used 161 healthy patients as controls.

It’s an opportunity so rare only 16 schools in the nation will participate, and one of those schools is from Jefferson County, Kentucky. As WLKY’s Monica Hardin reports, these students are taking their knowledge in science to a whole new level that’s out of this world.

Their experiment will fly aboard the last shuttle Endeavour mission, slated for April 2011. The students from Shawnee High School want to know whether the probiotic lactobacillus gg — a common good bacteria that grows in our gut — can live in microgravity, the conditions astronauts experience in outer space.

Here’s a list of the the other schools participating in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program.

One thing is for sure. Science doesn’t do certainty. No matter how close a researcher gets to complete certainty there is always room to know more. Therefore uncertainty is a scientific fact. And we need to get comfortable with it.

From taxonomic tussles over classifying the giant panda to more controversial science like climate change and genetics, uncertainty is a driving force pushing science forward and opening up the opportunity for insight and breakthrough discoveries.

VSS Enterprise

December 7 is a day that will now live in a new kind of infamy. It was the day that Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space company unveiled its new Space Ship 2 and almost blew 800 guests away — in hurricane-force winds — in the process.

Video of the destruction in the Mojave Desert where 105 mph winds ripped through site where VIPs celebrating the new spaceship had to be quickly evacuated.

Photo by: Alan Radecki, MojaveWest Media Works.

The world has gone nuts for five robotic hamsters, called Zhu Zhu Pets. While the cute and cuddly creatures race around on a surfboard, skateboard or in a car, the “it” toy of 2009 has some heavy metals that are within safety limits but beg the question: Do toys need to have these toxic ingredients at all?

Consumer products safety organizations measure the presence of dangerous elements two ways. One uses an XRF scanner to determine if a metal is present at all. The other dissolves the product in a solution to measure the presence and quantity of heavy metals.

New rules go into effect in 2010 that will require Zhu Zhu Pet maker Cepia and other toy manufacturers to follow stricter standards to ensure lead and other heavy metals don’t creep into toys and other goods.

Essco Safety Check, a Redmond, WA company is offering consumers free testing of any household item they bring to the Seattle-area retail location until mid January.

Over the course of the next few weeks we are going to be hearing a lot about carbon emissions–the gas released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and a whole host of other human activities. While the catch-all is called “carbon emissions” they aren’t confined to carbon dioxide gas.

During the Copenhagen Climate Conference we are going to be hearing a lot about what will follow the Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty aimed at reducing carbon emissions to help reduce the effects of man-made global warming.

A long-standing debate over younger women getting annual breast cancer screening is reigniting this week, after an independent medical panel changed its recommendations.

Confusion, fear and politics are swirling around the new U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendations. The task force now recommends shifting from annual to biennial mammograms for all women aged 50-74.

They no longer recommend annual mammograms and they don’t think women under 50 need them at all. By analyzing the available cancer data, they also found that breast self-examination didn’t reduce deaths from breast cancer.

Many groups are upset by the new recommendations and are urging women to continue annual screening like they have for years. Some are even tying this to health care reform and other politics.

Congress will hold hearings next month and even the White House felt compelled to weigh in on this issue.

Moon Water, courtesy of Babaloo.

After a lackluster lunar blast that was barely visible, scientists worried there might not be water on the moon. But after analyzing the mountain of preliminary data, NASA confirmed there is water–in the form of ice–just below the surface of the lunar poles.

This means that the mission was a roaring success and astronauts venturing to the moon may not have to bring their own water.

But how did the water get on the moon? Several scientists have several different theories.

Scientists within the most venerated science organizations in the United States are mounting rebellions against those organizations and their somewhat unified policy on the science of climate change–that it is real and being driven by human activities.

A group of several hundred of 47,000 physicists have unsuccessfully proposed new language for the American Physical Society.
It reads

Greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, accompany human industrial and agricultural activity. While substantial concern has been expressed that emissions may cause significant climate change, measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today. In addition, there is an extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals.

Studies of a variety of natural processes, including ocean cycles and solar variability, indicate that they can account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries. Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.

The APS supports an objective scientific effort to understand the effects of all processes – natural and human –on the Earth’s climate and the biosphere’s response to climate change, and promotes technological options for meeting challenges of future climate changes, regardless of cause.

On Tuesday, the APS decided to let its current national climate policy statement, which was adopted in November 2007 and reaffirmed last year, stand.
It reads:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

In October the 18 leading science organizations sent a letter (PDF) to the U.S. Senate, pledging assistance as the Congress enters deliberations to pass a law that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It reads:

Dear Senator:

As you consider climate change legislation, we, as leaders of scientific
organizations, write to state the consensus scientific view.

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is
occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the
greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.
These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence,
and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of
the vast body of peer-reviewed science. Moreover, there is strong
evidence that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on
society, including the global economy and on the environment. For the
United States, climate change impacts include sea level rise for coastal
states, greater threats of extreme weather events, and increased risk of
regional water scarcity, urban heat waves, western wildfires, and the
disturbance of biological systems throughout the country. The severity
of climate change impacts is expected to increase substantially in the
coming decades.

If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions
of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced. In addition,
adaptation will be necessary to address those impacts that are already
unavoidable. Adaptation efforts include improved infrastructure design,
more sustainable management of water and other natural resources,
modified agricultural practices, and improved emergency responses to
storms, floods, fires and heat waves.

We in the scientific community offer our assistance to inform your
deliberations as you seek to address the impacts of climate change.

Here’s the gist of the kitchen sink hoax. It starts with the end of the Mayan calendar, adds a mystery planet on a crash-course with Earth. Then there is some nonsense about the planets aligning on Dec. 21, 2012, heralding the end of the world. There are about six different pieces to this hoax, which seems to be gaining public momentum.

But the science just doesn’t hold up. Only a few pieces–yes, we will be experiencing a solar maximum and we will be in the galactic plane during this time–are actually true.

Here’s the hoax sorted out. Listen for yourself.

Beer has been flavoring human culture for at least 9,000 years. During that time, the rich brew has transformed and evolved to satisfy the complex palates of the time.

Now, science is a driving force in making beer. And, understanding some of the chemistry can refine color, aroma and flavor.

More Info:
IBU Chart Graph

Dogfish Head Brewery owner Sam Calagione talks ancient beer.

The biggest business lobby in the U.S. is pushing for the EPA to hold a public hearing to debate the science of global warming.

The move, calling for the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st Century, is proving too much for some chamber members, from big utilities to Nike and Johnson & Johnson.

Yesterday, the EPA announced it was moving forward with its plan to regulate stationary sources of greenhouse gas, including some 14,000 coal-fired power plants and refineries.

Now the ball is back in the chamber’s court and it’s time for it to decide whether it wants to sue the EPA and try to put the science on trial.

REALscience dissects the petition submitted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which reads like an anti-global warming play book.